Overview

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree on.

Napoleon Bonaparte, Maxims 1804 15

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today. Henry Ford, 1916

When presenting case studies of projects that have documented history attached to them, one is invariably faced with the dilemma of fully describing the case or simply presenting the historical documents. Henry Fuchs on occasions described the Stanford Case Library material by noting that:

Documented engineering design cases are sanitised versions of reality, they always read better than they lived. ^[7.1]

In what follows, I have chosen to present the documentation with some brief commentary. So that these cases should come alive for willing future participants in MaT project planning, they need to be lived through in one form or another. The mentors participating in the Melbourne projects invariably experienced a sense of d j vu, not only in the organisation, but also in the reactions and performance characteristics of students.

These projects have been used at Melbourne for basic introduction to formal design procedures and teamwork. As a consequence there has always been considerable confusion at project commencement. Almost invariably, work on the project would not commence in earnest until after the first project interview. At these interviews, many teams would try to tease out the boundaries of acceptable divergence...